


Stardew Vault

by pjf



Category: Fallout 3, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 07:48:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14444676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pjf/pseuds/pjf
Summary: Stardew Valley re-imagined in the Fallout universe, with Hermione Granger inheriting her grandfather's farm.





	1. Stardew Vault

Hermione drank the hot, bitter, caffeinated beverage and looked at the faded photo for the thousandth time. It pictured a young girl of four years, curly-haired and bright-eyed, riding atop an older man's shoulders. Next to them stood her obviously proud parents. 

Hermione knew the girl in the photo was herself, and the older gentleman to be her grandfather. She remembered crying when he died, and that he who had willed his place in the vault to her. Her parents would make it into a game whenever they visited the Vault-Tec facilities for Hermione's sleepovers. "Visiting Stardew Farm", they would call it, after the whimsical name her grandfather had given to the hydroponics system he had designed and installed there. 

It was only after Hermione had grown much older that she realised in reflection that her "sleepovers" must have been when her parents felt the threat of nuclear war to be particularly high, but they never seemed to let that worry spread to Hermione. The few memories she had was them always being in good cheer. 

Hermione never had a chance to say goodbye to her parents. They had dropped her off one day, she had changed into her jumpsuit, and she ran off to tinker with a robot or beg an engineer to let her use a Pip-Boy. But that day the door to the vault rolled shut, and The Great War had reduced the outside to an irradiated wasteland. 

She sighed, and tucked the photograph back into the lockbox where she kept her most valuable possessions. She reached for the schematics for the new Farm she was helping build, but her mind kept wandering elsewhere. She had so many questions about her family, about _why_ grandpa had a place in the vault but not her parents, but she resigned herself to not ever having answers. The questions she asked Overseer Lewis didn't seem to ever get very far; either he didn't know much about her family, or he didn't care to share what he knew. 

She drained the remainder of her beverage and grimaced. The supplies of coffee, tea, nuka-cola, and everything else were long gone. What beverages did exist were made from reclaimed nutrients and the few molecules the synthesizers could still produce. Somehow her grandfather's whimsical naming scheme had stuck—a homage to his hydroponics using recycled everything—and anything produced by the vault from scratch was given the prefix "Stardew". "Stardew Coffee" was truly awful. 

Hermione was softly stirred from her thoughts by a warm hand caressing her shoulder. 

"Are you okay, my love?" asked Maru, Hermione's wife and one of the few people she felt she could really talk to about Farming. 

"I guess so," said Hermione. "It was twenty years today since grandpa died, and..." she trailed off. 

Maru didn't need the sentence finished, and she wrapped her arms around Hermione from behind. "I know how hard it can be for you sometimes. The rest of us all have families here." 

"I _have_ a family here," said Hermione. "I've got you." 


	2. Stardew Farm

Every person in Stardew Vault had their assigned responsibilities, and for Hermione that revolved around food security. Stardew Farm was one of the largest installations in the vault, and was her grandfather's legacy, having been designed and built during his tenure at Joja Corporation. 

Rows upon rows of hydroponic units took up the space, but what really made the facility special was the Seed Maker. 

Hermione knew that some wild plants could still make their own seeds, but domestic plants had been improved by Joja to increase their yield, have better resistance to disease and herbicides, and remove their natural ability to reproduce. This was important to ensure not only that plants were predictable in their growth, but also so they couldn't cross-pollinate with wild plants and produce superweeds. 

The Seed Maker was the missing step, and is what differentiated Farmers from growers. A complex and proprietary piece of technology, it extracted the genetic information and nutrients of the material fed to it, selected the most viable genome, and manufactured fresh seeds that were ready for planting. The seeds consisted of the plant embryo itself, and a package of nutrients suited for the germination and growth of that particular plant. 

Every domestic plant—with one exception—would begin its life in the Seed Maker. Hermione had been told that before the Great War using the seed maker was a mostly automated affair. Sometimes a visit by a Joja technician would be required to update software licenses, but mostly Farmers would feed it with plants they wished to grow more of, along with the occasional purchased bottle of Joja NutriGrow™, and plant the resulting seeds. 

The one exception to all this were sunflowers. Sunflowers created their own seeds, and required no Seed Maker in its life-cycle. As far as Hermione knew sunflowers were completely unimproved by Joja. 

But over the years the crops had been failing. The farm had an adjacent facility that handled the reclamation of nutrients from waste, and which even included a small chapel for any of the vault's deceased, but no reclamation process was ever 100% efficient. As time went on, the solution being fed to plants would lose important micro-nutrients, and the vault's supplies of NutriGrow had long since been exhausted. 

A Seed Maker without NutriGrow, and working with a limited array of nutrients, was anything but an automated affair. The vault's Seed Maker had a Joja Corporation master license installed on it, giving Hermione full access to modify everything in the genomes it copied and the seed composition it implanted them into. When not working at the Farm, Hermione would spend her days reading up on genetics, botany, and microbiology, searching for new ways to extend the viability of the vault's increasingly less viable seed-lines. 

Maru felt like such a gift in all this. Most of the technical aspects of Hermione's work were beyond that of the average vault-dweller, but Maru seemed to have an unending thirst for technical knowledge. She was someone that Hermione could bounce ideas off, and both celebrate her successes and analyse her failures. 

And yet despite being together almost a year, Maru never had much success with the Seed Maker herself. "I don't know how you do it, hun," she would say. "I try the same adjustments and my plants don't grow at all. It's like you're magic or something." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> License: CC-BY-NC-ND

**Author's Note:**

> License: CC-BY-NC-ND


End file.
